Theological fatalism is the view that we cannot make any free choices because God already knows what we are going to do. This view is very unattractive to many theists who want to hold both that God is omniscient and also that we have the free will to choose to worship him. Naturally, many have gone to great lengths to refute theological fatalism. The problem, however, continues to prove challenging. However, I will propose my solution to the problem by outlining and objecting to an argument for theological fatalism that comes from Nelson Pike. His argument goes as follows:

1. 1000 years ago, it was true that you will eat sushi tomorrow.
2. If something is true, then God believes that it’s true.
3. So, 1000 years ago, God believed that you will eat sushi tomorrow.
4. The fact that it was true 1000 years ago that God believed that you will eat sushi tomorrow entails that you will eat sushi tomorrow.
5. If A entails B, and you can’t change A, then you can’t change B.
6. You can’t change the fact that it was true 1000 years ago that God believed that you will eat sushi tomorrow.
7. So, you can’t change that you will eat sushi tomorrow.
8. So, you must eat sushi tomorrow.
9. If you must do A -- and you can’t avoid doing A -- then you’re not free with respect to A.
10. So, you’re not free with respect to eating sushi tomorrow.

If this argument succeeds, then we are never free to make any of our choices, and many theists will be left quite disgruntled. However, there may be hope for them with a different conception of omniscience. One view of how God knows everything that will happen is that he is temporally omnipresent. By this, I mean God exists in every moment in time simultaneously. So, while he is watching me eat sushi tomorrow, he is also watching the wheel being invented, and also watching my death, all at the same time. If this is true, then God did know 1000 years ago that I would eat sushi, but only because he was watching me do it. My objection specifically targets premise 4 in the above argument. It seems to me like premise 4 gets the entailment backward. It’s not that God knows I will eat sushi tomorrow and so I do. Rather, it’s that I will eat sushi tomorrow and so God knows it. Under this view of omniscience, we can also reject premise 6. Since God is experiencing all moments in time at all times, we can change what he believed 1000 years ago. I can simply refrain from eating sushi tomorrow. If I do this, then it will not be the case that God believed 1000 years ago that I will eat sushi. The key is that God knows everything that happens because he is constantly watching it happen, not predetermining what will happen.